The Show for Aug. 19, 2026: LDS history in Arizona politics, studying ibogaine and more

Arizona’s gubernatorial race will put a spotlight on a long-simmering political divide within the Mormon community. The longtime impact of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Arizona politics. Plus, Arizona scientists will begin studying the potential medical use of ibogaine.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona.BannerHealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I’m Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, could the psychedelic drug ibogaine effectively treat PTSD? Arizona researchers want to find out. And American teens are letting AI figure out the answers to their schoolwork at record numbers.

But first, President Donald Trump has for years claimed without evidence that there is widespread voter fraud in this country. Listen to the White House and you might believe that non-citizens are illegally voting in elections en masse.

Our first guest this morning found the Trump administration deployed Homeland Security Investigations, a force that’s normally tasked with combating drug cartels and terrorism, with a nationwide campaign to identify non-citizen voters. And the results have been sparse. Jen Fifield is on the team that reported the story for ProPublica. She’s based here in Arizona and she’s on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Jen.

JEN FIFIELD: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. In this new investigation, you and your team dug into the Trump administration’s efforts to uncover his claims of widespread voter fraud in the country. They used HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, to do this. Tell us exactly what they did.

JEN FIFIELD: Well, we first got wind in January that Trump was trying to take this extreme step to try to prove his claim by drilling up tens of thousands of leads of potential noncitizen voters and giving them out to these Homeland Security agents. So we set out trying to understand how those leads came to be, and we found that HSI took publicly available voter rolls from the state, like you or I could purchase, and put them into its tech and databases despite warnings from insiders that it would produce this ungodly number of false positives.

So then they start pursuing these and they start crumbling as they investigate the leads that they were given. So ultimately, our investigation found that there have been fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters referred for prosecution in total in this second Trump administration and just 41 have been charged.

LAUREN GILGER: Forty-one, and that’s amid how many people voting in this country? Give us a sense.

JEN FIFIELD: One-hundred-fifty million voted in the last presidential election nationwide.

LAUREN GILGER: So just a massive gap there. They used, as you said there, this publicly available data on voters, these data voter rolls that anyone could get, but that’s different than what they were trying to get or are trying to get, right? We’ve seen this fight here in Arizona, where Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has refused to turn over confidential voter information to the feds.

JEN FIFIELD: Well, right. So if you give the unredacted voter rolls ... this has the last four of your Social Security numbers or your driver’s license numbers. That would allow the federal government to do a concrete, hard match to find out who you are. The problem here is they’re just taking public voter rolls, which don’t include those unique identifiers, and trying to match them up with people they know who are immigrants in their Homeland Security database.

And obviously, as the leads fall apart, it’s clear we see across the country — specifically in Ohio and Texas, two states we really zoomed in on — that they even reach out to counties and find voters who have never lived there or registered to vote.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so that’s the false positives they were warned of. They were also warned that this could be illegal, right?

JEN FIFIELD: Privacy experts within the Department of Justice, once they found out that this sharing was happening of these public voter rolls over to HSI, they started throwing up red flags saying — one of them, a 29-year veteran, we found in an email said he slept on it and decided they shouldn’t be sharing all this. It would implicate the privacy of citizens across the country. They moved forward anyway.

LAUREN GILGER: What did the Trump administration have to say about those results? One-hundred-fifty alleged noncitizen voters referred for prosecution, fewer were charged, 41. Did they defend these massive efforts to get 41 charges?

JEN FIFIELD: Well, they don’t talk about the prosecutions. They talk about their large number claims. So DHS stood up on podiums in July and announced 250 potential noncitizens in just four states. So they’re putting out the initial claims, not what’s going to prosecution. They are defending this. They’re defending the data sharing as essential to secure our elections, and they’re saying that in the meantime, Homeland Security has continued with its mission and been able to combat cross-border crime as it does this work.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Let’s back up for a moment, Jen, and talk about the broader picture here. Voter fraud in the U.S. has been proven to be, as you found here, exceedingly rare over and over again, right? Put it into that broader context for us.

JEN FIFIELD: There’s been studies over time, over the years, since — mainly since Trump has started claiming this in 2016 that he lost the popular vote because of noncitizen voting. There’s been state audits that have found just 200 or so noncitizens registered in states, and ultimately very few of those voted. And if they did, a lot of times they thought that they could. People are sometimes confused if they’re a permanent resident in the U.S., they think they can vote. So these studies over time have all proven what the Trump administration is finding now.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and when you say they thought they could vote, sometimes they’re even put accidentally by authorities on voter rolls, right?

JEN FIFIELD: Right. So in New Jersey, they just announced an error in state record keeping that put more than 6,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls, even though they had declared that they were not a citizen. So there’s administrative errors that come into play that a lot of those people don’t ultimately vote because they don’t even know they’re registered.

LAUREN GILGER: Jen, what do critics have to say here? This comes as the Trump administration is pushing for the SAVE Act, which basically federalizes elections in many ways.

JEN FIFIELD: Well, it’s just another step that Trump is taking to try to take more control over elections, to try to prove ... he won in 2020 as the main thing, and try to, before the midterms, stir up doubt about our elections even more than he already has.

LAUREN GILGER: We’ll leave it there. Jen Fifield with ProPublica joining us. Jen, thanks so much for your reporting here. Thanks for coming on.

JEN FIFIELD: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Nearly three-quarters of American teenagers say they use AI for schoolwork. Of those, more than 60% say they use it to get an answer rather than figuring it out for themselves. Those are among the findings of a new survey from the Youth AI Safety Institute at Common Sense Media. The group surveyed more than a thousand teens, asking them about whether they use AI for schoolwork, and if so, how.

To talk more about what the survey found, my co-host Mark Brodie spoke with Geoffrey Fowler, head of public engagement for the Youth AI Safety Institute, and they started with what stands out to him from the results.

GEOFFREY FOWLER: Two things really stand out to me. 70% of all American teenagers are using AI for schoolwork. So we’ve moved far past the point where the concern is a couple of early adopter kids might be using ChatGPT for cheating. That’s a really big moment.

The other thing that really stuck out to me is that of those kids who are using AI for their schoolwork, the majority admit, even in a survey, that they’re sometimes using it in ways that hand off some of the thinking, that they’re using it to just get answers sometimes. And that’s a really big deal for the basics of education. What are we doing at school if we’ve given every American teenager an easy shortcut tool that means that they don’t have to do critical thinking anymore?

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s particularly interesting that that many admit to it, right?

GEOFFREY FOWLER: Exactly. I believe them. If anything, probably we’re slightly undercounting how much they’re using AI and the ways that they’re using it. The other thing that though I think makes this a more complicated story is that those same kids who said that, "Yes, sometimes we’re using it in ways that replace thinking," also say they are sometimes using it in ways that they think are more productive. They’re using it as brainstorming tools, they’re using it to get feedback on their work, they’re not just going to it for answers. So kids have this sort of complicated relationship with AI, and they’re using it as part of the ordinary everyday parts of being a teenager in school now.

MARK BRODIE: It was also interesting that at least some number of the teens who say they’re using AI for schoolwork basically to give them the answers, they seem to acknowledge that they’re almost depriving themselves of something in their educational experience. They’re aware of what they’re doing and yet still doing it.

GEOFFREY FOWLER: Yeah, this is this really complicated moment that we’re at, right? Teens themselves see the cost of using AI. They see that when they have it available, about 38% of them say they think they develop fewer ideas when they have it available, and 39% say that they feel like they’re missing out on learning when they use AI to complete assignments.

So they have this understanding, but let’s put this in some context. Kids are under incredible pressure in school now, right? They are trying to figure out how to make it in this world. They see all of the adults around them, they see their parents, their teachers, political leaders even, using AI tools, and they say, "Well, then why can’t I?"

And I think that what the real problem here is that we as adults are letting them down because we’re not giving them guidance and helping them figure out how they should and shouldn’t be using this stuff and what is and isn’t helpful and appropriate for young minds when you’re just learning all of these critical thinking skills.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so that kind of gets, I think, at least in part to policies that schools and maybe individual teachers have for AI use in their classrooms. Do you find that those are understood? Are they effective? I mean, you kind of referred to the fact that we’re beyond the point of just a couple of kids who figured out, "Hey, this AI thing can be really helpful." Pretty much everybody’s using it now, so what are schools doing about it and is it effective?

GEOFFREY FOWLER: Schools clearly aren’t doing enough and aren’t doing the right things. So some people think, "Well, the solution is easy, we should just go ban AI in schools." Well, in our survey, we asked kids about that, and among those who use AI for schoolwork, 44% said that they have had an AI tool blocked on a school network or on their school device. But you know what they did? 60% of them just switched to a personal device instead, and on their personal device, they don’t have support, they don’t have any guardrails at all, so we’re kind of in a worse situation than we were before.

The education experts that we’re working with here at Common Sense Media really think that we need a different kind of approach. What we need is AI literacy. We need to have teachers and parents and families and communities talking with kids about the best ways, the good ways to use AI, and also how to stay safe with it.

MARK BRODIE: Are parents and teachers and others prepared to help teenagers figure this stuff out though? Are we AI literate enough to really be good guides here?

GEOFFREY FOWLER: What you’re pointing out is behind every corner with this AI situation, there’s another new set of problems, right? So teachers do not feel like they are AI experts. Parents do not feel like they are AI experts. I’m based in San Francisco in the capital of the AI world, and plenty of people here do not feel — in the industry — do not feel like they’re AI experts. It’s moving so fast, so I think we have to sort of accept that you don’t have to be an expert to have a conversation with your kid about it and to explore it with them, right?

To say, "Hey, you know what? Google now gives you an AI-generated answer every time you search for something. Let’s try this together and try the same query a bunch of times and see how we get different answers every time we ask a question. And from that, maybe we can learn and have a conversation about, ’You know what? AI isn’t expert. It doesn’t actually know the answer. It’s just kind of figuring it out each time, and sometimes we can’t trust what it says.’"

So you’ve got to have kind of an open mind to explore this stuff with kids and to talk about your values, talk about what feels like cheating and what doesn’t, why is it important to go through the process of doing a school assignment like the teacher asked as opposed to just turning to AI to get it done more quickly.

And then for schools, a little bit of good news. With this research, Common Sense Media, we’ve also produced some new curriculum for high school, for high schools, and our curriculum is already used by 70% of American high schools. And this new curriculum focuses on digital literacy specifically around AI, so it gives teachers courses and lesson plans they can do with their kids to work through thinking about how AI is impacting them, and again, to teach those critical thinking skills that we know are going to be important for the future.

MARK BRODIE: Is it safe to say that one of the biggest lessons that it would be helpful for teenagers, and maybe for adults to learn as well, is the ways in which AI can be helpful and the ways in which AI is either providing a shortcut or is maybe unhelpful?

GEOFFREY FOWLER: Yeah, I think we need to talk about that difference and tease through it together. To be completely honest, I’m not certain we’ve figured out yet what specific tools or apps or whatnot are actually useful for education at this point. It’s all so new, we’re still figuring it out.

But I think we can say that we know that the skill that is going to matter most for the future is not a technical skill. It’s not about being the smartest person about using AI. It’s about human skills. It’s about being able to communicate and think critically and have a conversation. And so those are the things that schools really need to emphasize to prepare kids for the AI era, not technical skills.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Geoffrey Fowler, head of public engagement with the Youth AI Safety Institute at Common Sense Media. Geoffrey, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

GEOFFREY FOWLER: You bet. Great talking to you, and I hope we get to do it again.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, it’s often bittersweet, nerve-racking to send your child off to college, but for one parent, those feelings are magnified with her youngest daughter who has Down syndrome.

But first, the political world is abuzz with the news that we, for the first time ever, officially have two lieutenant governor picks. Republican candidate Andy Biggs chose former state lawmaker and dairy farmer Sine Kerr, and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs made a more unconventional choice in picking former Mesa mayor and former Republican John Giles. And while lots is being said and written about both choices and how they could help or hurt their respective campaigns, our next guest this morning has a slightly different take.

Brigham Tomco covers politics for Deseret News in Salt Lake City, and as he calls it, this is a battle of the BYU grads. Biggs and Giles are both members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and graduates of its flagship school, Brigham Young University. I spoke with Tomco more about it and how it reflects a long-standing political divide in the Mormon world.

BRIGHAM TOMCO: This has kind of been a simmering debate, maybe for the past decade, where members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who are conservative in the state of Arizona have been split on the direction of the Republican Party and their allegiance to the party. And so you’ve had very prominent figures on both sides of this debate in Arizona, as your listeners are well aware. You’d have former Senator Jeff Flake, for example, in the same camp as John Giles, the former mayor of Mesa, where they think that the party has left them and that the politics and rhetoric of Donald Trump do not represent their values that they get, they say, from their faith.

On the other side, you have folks like Andy Biggs or Tyler Bowyer, who runs the political campaign arm of Turning Point, and these are also members of the same church who think that the current iteration of the Republican Party, this maybe more aggressive, populist feel, is very in line with their conservative values. And so you’ve seen this play out at the highest levels of politics in Arizona where Turning Point, for example, helped to oust Rusty Bowers, the former State House speaker who’s also a member of the church, but who spoke out against the Trump administration. And so I think now in 2026, you’re seeing this come to a head in the Arizona gubernatorial race.

LAUREN GILGER: This is going to be an interesting one to watch in this world, for sure. How do Latter-day Saints sort of lean politically these days? How does this divide within the community play out in polling?

BRIGHAM TOMCO: So there has been a lot said and written about how Latter-day Saints are not on the Trump train. I think in some cases that’s been overblown. I think most people will point to in 2016 how Utah voted in significant numbers for a third-party candidate to try and find an alternative to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and that’s kind of the big data point they’re using. There’s also something to be said for the fact that over the past 20 years, Latter-day Saints went from being the most Republican religious voting block to the second-most Republican voting block. And so there has been a shift to the left that you have not seen in any other religious demographic in the state, although we’re still one of the most Republican voting groups in the country.

And so there’s those two factors to take into account, although other polling has shown that Gen Z Latter-day Saints have kind of warmed up to Trump. Maybe that’s what they’ve come to know as Republican politics, and so they’re still voting for him in similar ratios and rates as older generations.

LAUREN GILGER: Interesting. So a shifting political demographic, but still very Republican. What is the objection that so many Latter-day Saints seem to have, especially when Trump was new to the political scene and really changed the conversation, changed the mode of politics, and changed the platform in some ways of the GOP? What was the objection from many Latter-day Saints, like John Giles, like Jeff Flake at the time?

BRIGHAM TOMCO: So I think the stereotype of Latter-day Saints as being very kind bleeds into political philosophy for lots of Latter-day Saints, where they see the way you go about your politics as being just as important as the actual policy solutions you’re putting forward. And so I think from the beginning of the first Trump campaign up until now, you’ll hear Latter-day Saints who say, "Listen, I have more conservative values, there are policy positions of Donald Trump that I agree with, but I don’t agree with the way he talks about it or treats his political enemies." And so I think that is a very real constituency among Latter-day Saints.

LAUREN GILGER: We saw John Giles in particular, I think, go even further than many others, where it wasn’t like he even stayed in the Republican Party. Officially left a few months ago. He was sort of the face of Republicans for Harris. He spoke at the DNC, right? Tell us about John Giles in particular and his brand of this version of LDS politics.

BRIGHAM TOMCO: You see some politicians in Utah who have made a quote-unquote "disagree better" approach to politics kind of their brand. You saw this with Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who actually in the past few years has endorsed Donald Trump and tried to mend some of those relationships with the Republican Party. But John Giles has taken that the other direction, saying that his priority of making the Republican Party, or at least his politics, a welcoming place, a place where people can bridge divides and be peacemakers, has pushed him out of the party entirely. Like you said, earlier this year he unaffiliated with the Republican Party for the first time in his adult life, and he told me that was because he felt more comfortable as a quote "independent," and he thinks that that is the best place to govern from because you’re able to listen to both sides of an argument and not get bogged down, I guess, by partisan loyalties, is how he described it.

LAUREN GILGER: I want to ask you about the way this plays out in religious communities, maybe at a very local level, right? I remember interviewing Julie Spilsbury a year or two ago when she was ousted from the Mesa City Council by the Turning Point coalition, right? She hadn’t voted the way that they wanted her to on some issues, and they recalled her. And she said it was so personal to her because she had people in her church that she saw every week, their kids had grown up together, who voted to recall her. Is this something that’s becoming very personal within the Latter-day Saint community?

BRIGHAM TOMCO: I think there’s something unique about the way politics and the Latter-day Saint community overlap in Arizona that I haven’t seen as much in Utah. So another example of this in 2022 was John Giles’ friend Clint Smith ran against Andy Biggs in an ultimately unsuccessful effort for Congress. But what you saw in that race was Turning Point Action’s COO Tyler Bowyer, again a Latter-day Saint, putting signs in the neighborhoods of Clint Smith, John Giles, and Jeff Flake calling out their church membership and saying that they were acting out of step with church leaders or church doctrine. And so it did become very personal, even to the point of these yard sign campaigns in their neighbors’ front yards.

And so I do think maybe something about Arizona being a swing state, or something about Turning Point USA being located there, or maybe a combination of all these things, has really put a spotlight on that overlap between Latter-day Saint identity and partisan politics.

LAUREN GILGER: So what are you watching for, Brigham, as this race plays out, now that we have sort of two BYU grads on either side of the ticket going at each other and representing this kind of unspoken debate within the community for a very long time?

BRIGHAM TOMCO: Well, there’s so many interesting layers to this. For one, Governor Katie Hobbs picked John Giles as her running mate for an important reason, and whether that is pure political strategy to try to appeal to Mesa voters that he represented for about a decade as their mayor, or maybe it’s more symbolic — they both are trying to convey this message of lowering the political temperature, putting Arizona above politics, as they’ve said before. And so I think that’s one thing to watch.

And another piece is that Andy Biggs has also represented an area of the East Valley with lots of Latter-day Saints in Congress. And so I think you may see a lot of focus on this particular geography and this demographic where they will be appealing to those identities that they share as Latter-day Saints, as conservatives, and the direction this state wants to go.

LAUREN GILGER: We’ll see which way it goes in the end. Brigham Tomco is a politics reporter at Deseret News joining us. Brigham, thank you very much for coming on The Show. Thanks for taking the time, appreciate it.

BRIGHAM TOMCO: Yeah, thank you very much.

LAUREN GILGER: The battle of the BYU grads, as Tomco put it, is just the latest iteration of the impact of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arizona politics, though. In reality, the history of politics in this state is filled with LDS figures, from Arizona Congressman Mo Udall and Governor Evan Mecham to Congressman Matt Salmon, Senator Jeff Flake, State Senate Presidents Rusty Bowers, Russell Pearce, and currently Warren Petersen. And the list could go on. The Udall family’s legacy in Arizona politics alone goes back to territorial days.

KEVIN DEMENNA: The state itself is built around an aspect of LDS culture that’s woven into our politics, into our Native American relationships. It’s just impossible to miss.

LAUREN GILGER: That is Kevin DeMenna, a longtime Arizona lobbyist and Latter-day Saint. His family’s public affairs firm has been a force in shaping Arizona policy for generations. Kevin’s sons run the firm today. I sat down with DeMenna in his office in downtown Phoenix recently, surrounded by Arizona memorabilia and an impressive saddle collection, to talk more about the long and winding history of LDS politics in Arizona. And he told me he is actually a convert to the faith after he fell in love with his wife.

KEVIN DEMENNA: She wasn’t going to marry anybody that wasn’t a member of the church, and I wasn’t going to marry anybody else. But what happened for me is that my work here and my faith are inextricably linked. Way back around 1980, I got an internship in the Senate, and the president of the Senate in this period was Stan Turley. And Stan Turley is just a giant of a man. Long passed, but his pedigree is from the Snows and the Flakes. He’s a cousin to Jeff Flake, former Speaker Jake Flake I think is a nephew. The end result, though, was that as an intern down there, I eventually became chief of staff, and President Turley through lots of conversation invited himself to my home. This is the classic side of the LDS outreach. And I think he and his wife Cleo probably came over seven or eight evenings, and he baptized me. And then for the remainder of the time he was in politics, he was a mentor.

LAUREN GILGER: So in kind of that front-row seat that you’ve had to Arizona politics over the last many decades, give us some of the highlights, some of the big names, some of the people that everyone’s probably heard of and maybe did not realize were Latter-day Saints.

KEVIN DEMENNA: The things I’ve seen, if only I could tell all the stories. But Matt Salmon and Nancy Salmon, equally political giants, but also individuals that you look for, that their faith works in their daily decision-making. There is an aspect to being Mormon that their expectations — I wear a white shirt every day, mainly just because it’s easier to get dressed. But there’s an aspect to our doctrine that has woven itself into our daily existence. Latter-day Saints are a peculiar people. That comes from a church leader years ago, and by that, we are noticed. President Ezra Taft Benson, who is one of the most noteworthy of our church leaders simply because of his dual role as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, the church leadership council worldwide, and the eight years he spent as Secretary of Agriculture for President Eisenhower. This was when agriculture and that position really mattered.

Little things: he would never allow himself to be photographed with a cocktail glass. He would order milk so that at the state receptions, when the toasts were offered, there was no confusion. So the challenge and the benefit is that we do wear it on our sleeve, and as a result, people look for chinks in the armor.

LAUREN GILGER: So the LDS population in our state is not huge — it’s 6%. It’s notable, but it’s not Utah. I wonder why you think the representation of folks from your faith has been so oversized?

KEVIN DEMENNA: It’s a really fair question. The answer, I think, is complementary to the faith. There is an element of service in what we do. All of my sons, including me, are Eagle Scouts. Seminary, getting up at 6:00 a.m. to learn more about the gospel. These things, there’s an air of service. Now Rusty Bowers, it was my privilege to work closely with him and to watch him lose an election. He won handily, he never really did any fundraising, not much campaigning, but always coasted. He lost his last election by 19 points because of the endorsement of his opponent from President Trump.

LAUREN GILGER: Well, and this was a very interesting moment, I think, in LDS politics and one that got national attention, right? Because this was this kind of tipping point where you watched somebody who had been a giant in Arizona politics really fall in the Trump era, and on kind of moral principles, it sounded like.

KEVIN DEMENNA: When Rusty spoke to the congressional panel, he read from his journal. Mormons keep journals and it can get tedious at times, but I remember him telling me when he returned that he got a standing ovation on the airplane as he boarded that same day to fly back home. There is an element of commitment that what I’m doing is right, and as a result, whatever slings and arrows may follow, it’s right and I need to follow through.

The giants, Stan Turley, unquestionably at the top, Jake Flake, Bob Worsley, there’s a handful of individuals that stand out because not only did they come with an extraordinary sense of integrity, but they also have an intellect that allows them — you meld these two things and you’ve got one heck of a policymaker. It’s just something you can’t really mix or match and get it any other way.

LAUREN GILGER: So that, you think, blend has been very impactful in what happens in Arizona politics, what’s happened in Arizona policy. How do you think it shaped the state?

KEVIN DEMENNA: Oh, my goodness. Well, we wouldn’t have had Snowflake but for that. It could have been Flakesnow, but the notion that somewhere in this pile on the desk in front of me is Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure. This is the Bible of the legislature, these are the rules that you play by. And the most important thing for protocol is that each member is equal. They may not have enough votes, but they are to be treated with the dignity and the humanity that every other member, who may have more votes, is treated with.

So there’s the doing and the telling, and as I like to say, the doing with the Latter-day Saint world is there. It’s hard to miss the ditches we’ve dug, the towns we’ve settled, and the leaders that have grown out of this.

LAUREN GILGER: So let me ask you about the political side of that, right? Because I think there have been very many successful LDS politicians, and there still are in the state. But in the era of Trump in particular, in light of what we just talked about with Rusty Bowers, is that shifting? Is it something that politicians would shy away from talking about anymore?

KEVIN DEMENNA: Yes. Heck, I hardly want to talk about it. As Latter-day Saints, we are always mindful of our bearing, of our countenance. This doesn’t need to be a blood sport. It’s become that so much, and there’s a natural sort of angle of repose, if you will, where we don’t yell. In fact, the prophet, the leader of our faith right now: "Peacemaker, be a peacemaker."

LAUREN GILGER: So I wonder, do you think that today within the church itself and within members of the church itself here, there is a political divide? I mean, you see, I interviewed Julie Willoughby not too long ago about members of her own faith, members of her own church that she saw every week voting her out of office, voting to recall her, and she was devastated by that. Do you think in the era of Trump and in the era of what’s gone on with conservative politics, it looks a little different, feels a little different today?

KEVIN DEMENNA: Well, it definitely feels different. But when they turned on the internet, everything sped up and communication changed fundamentally. And the beauty of politics and the beauty of the internet is that that will be known. It will be — you will be shown for the person you are.

When I look at the behavior of all of our legislators, the tone on the floor is different now. I suspect more is at stake, at least in the minds of some. The fact is that Latter-day Saints have had an oversized impact on how Arizona has grown and developed, and it’s because these teachings aren’t just gospel theory, they’re how to manage your life on a day-to-day basis. And that comes through. I’m proud of that. Any guy or gal can get a bill passed, but doing it in a way that adds to the number of friends you have and a more enlightened approach, it’s simply better. Being a peacemaker, it’s just a better long-term strategy.

LAUREN GILGER: Kevin DeMenna, thank you so much.

KEVIN DEMENNA: You’re welcome. Loved to talk about this.

LAUREN GILGER: Barrow Neurological Institute expects to start enrolling patients next year in a research study testing whether the psychedelic ibogaine can safely treat people with certain neurological disorders. The study is the result of a $5 million grant from the state and will test potential treatments for patients with conditions like traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

To talk more about this, my co-host Mark Brodie spoke with Dr. Susan Criswell, chief medical officer for clinical research at Barrow Neurological Institute, and they started with what this study will look like.

SUSAN CRISWELL: Kind of the overall question that we’re going to ask is whether ibogaine can be administered safely and whether it can help people with persistent symptoms from traumatic brain injury, or TBI.

So to do that, we’re proposing a what’s called a Phase I/II double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. This is funded by the state of Arizona, which we are very appreciative of. And we are going to enroll 40 adults with chronic traumatic brain injury symptoms, and this will be conducted jointly with researchers at the Barrow and at Arizona State University. And half of the participants will receive a single dose of ibogaine and half a placebo. And then we will follow those people for six months really to determine whether there are improvements in their symptoms that persist.

MARK BRODIE: Do you have a hypothesis of what you think might happen?

SUSAN CRISWELL: Well, we do have a hypothesis, but of course we have to test that hypothesis. And like I said, the question is really, does ibogaine improve symptoms in people with traumatic brain injuries, especially persistent symptoms? And those would include things like cognitive and emotional and physical difficulties. We know that people with TBI often also suffer from PTSD and depression and anxiety-related symptoms, and just in general struggle with things in their daily life.

And we will be measuring all of those things at baseline, they will receive the treatment, and then afterwards we would follow up on those symptoms to see if we see changes. I’d like to say this is also a very early-phase trial, so we’re also very focused on safety in this trial. And that’s actually our number one thing that we’re going to look at is, is ibogaine safe to administer to individuals with TBI?

And so this trial is going to be conducted in an intensive care unit in a very well-monitored inpatient setting, and we will be doing cardiac monitoring, we’ll be doing regular vital signs, we’re going to administer magnesium, and we’re really focused on making sure the safety aspect is well assessed.

MARK BRODIE: Do you have a sense, just sort of based on research that’s been done already or just your own reading of it, of what the potential of ibogaine is? Could this really be a big help for folks with traumatic brain injuries or PTSD or things like that?

SUSAN CRISWELL: Well, I think you referenced some of the early anecdotal study information that’s been published is really interesting and exciting. And I think the underlying premise is that could ibogaine sort of rewire or help to reorganize and adapt the human brain? This concept is known as neuroplasticity, so one of the questions is, could ibogaine be a neuroplastogen? And you could imagine how that might be helpful in someone with a traumatic brain injury.

And we are kind of going to dig into that mechanism aspect a little bit. So we’re doing MRIs at baseline, and then after ibogaine administration, we’re also going to do EEG, looking at sort of that functional connections in the brain and see if they change with ibogaine administration. So we are going to try and dig into that mechanism part of it a little bit to see if we can understand some of that biology that might be occurring when ibogaine is administered.

MARK BRODIE: Are there certain neural connections, like specific ones, that you’re looking at to see if ibogaine affects/improves?

SUSAN CRISWELL: Well, when we do MRI and EEG in this case, it’s really looking at whole-brain connections, so it’s not necessarily focused on one, but some of the early studies do indicate there are multiple neurotransmitters and connections that are changed with administration.

MARK BRODIE: What have you learned from some of the other studies that have been going on or have been done about this that will maybe inform what you’re doing here and maybe what you’re looking for here?

Barrow Neurological Institute
Dr. Susan Criswell

SUSAN CRISWELL: Well, I think some of the early studies, we’re building on some of the testing that they did and sort of building and expanding. Remember, some of these early studies are not blinded, so the participant, the investigators, they all know what’s being administered. And so kind of taking it to that next step is when you start to do double-blinded, rigorous scientific studies and replicate some of those findings that we saw in the early studies.

MARK BRODIE: Does the fact that this is relatively new and sort of a trendy thing to talk about, there’s a lot of buzz around it, does that impact what you’re doing or how you’re doing it or the fact that you are doing it in any way?

SUSAN CRISWELL: Well, I think it does give us the potential to do the study. Interest helps generate interest in funding studies and providing the resources we need to conduct these types of studies, so we’re very appreciative of that. But as far as the scientific rigor, I think we follow what we traditionally use for a Phase I/Phase II trial in any medication that we’re testing to see if it might improve neurological outcomes.

MARK BRODIE: So I know that you’re looking to enroll people starting next year. What does the timeline look like after that? Once you start getting folks in this study, how long do you think it’ll take, when might you have a sense of what the results might be?

SUSAN CRISWELL: Sure. So that’s correct, we are for the next year doing regulatory work, we’re getting contracting, and as you said, this is a drug that’s not been administered in the United States before, so this is a lengthy process for us to work through. But we are anticipating first participant enrolled hopefully about a year from now at this time. And then we’ll be enrolling over the next probably two to three years. It’s a total of five years for the study, and so the last year will really be focused on writing up results, publishing our findings, and that sort of thing.

But remember, we’re following people for six months, so even when we enroll someone in the second year, we still have to do the follow-up on all the participants and do our subsequent testing, so that does take a little bit of time.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a reason why you decided to look at ibogaine as opposed to any other psychedelics that people are talking about that may also hold potential for treating some of these ailments?

SUSAN CRISWELL: Well, in this case, this was the ask from the state of Arizona. They did want a project focused on ibogaine specifically, and there is, of course, a lot of public information about that that seems like it may be a promising medication. So I think those two combined kind of brought this grant application and this proposal into fruition.

LAUREN GILGER: Dr. Susan Criswell is chief medical officer for clinical research at Barrow Neurological Institute.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

Not long after Amy Silverman’s daughter, Sophie, was born, Amy began telling stories for KJZZ about what it’s like to raise a child with Down syndrome. Now Sophie is 23. Later this month, she’s moving to Denver to attend a small university with a program designed for students with intellectual disabilities, something Amy never would have imagined when Sophie was young, and something she and Sophie are still trying to wrap their heads around.

AMY SILVERMAN: When Sophie was 5, we sent her to kindergarten. I was terrified. Sophie had attended a preschool for kids with developmental disabilities. The district insisted on a similar setting for kindergarten, but I insisted more. So Sophie went to our neighborhood school, just like her big sister. Not exactly like her big sister. Sophie wasn’t tall enough to reach even the kindergarten toilets, so she had to pee in the nurse’s office. She couldn’t write her name. I was positive she’d go missing the first day. I spent my nights wondering if we should get her microchipped like a puppy or tattoo my contact information on her body. If found, please call.

I spent my days worrying out loud on Facebook, where I’d found a small community of moms of kids with Down syndrome. Every single one of those moms said the same thing: “She’ll be fine. Save your energy. Kindergarten is the easy part.”

And now, 18 years later, I know exactly what they meant. Later this month, our family will fly to Denver to drop Sophie off at college. I feel like I’m about to leap out of a plane with a parachute that might work, and I’m jumping with my daughter in my arms. Still, it’s time. Probably past time.

Sophie graduated from high school four years ago. Public school was never perfect, but it provided structure, a place to be each morning, and a legal requirement that Sophie be included. There is no such requirement in the real world. Despite that, Sophie’s accomplished a lot. She attended community college and performed with the school’s dance company. She took and passed kinesiology — I can still barely pronounce the word. She performed as Audrey in “Little Shop of Horrors” and Morticia in “The Addams Family.” She voted in her first presidential election.

On Mother’s Day last year, she woke up and announced we were getting tattoos of hearts we drew for each other. Sophie didn’t flinch.

She also spent a lot of time in bed these past four years drinking cranberry juice, eating Goldfish crackers, watching YouTube, and scrolling her contacts, looking for friends to call or text. In a lot of ways, it’s felt like Sophie’s been waiting all this time to write her own story, and now she has her chance. She’ll live in a dorm with a roommate who also has Down syndrome, she’ll eat in the dining hall, take classes, and go to parties.

I can’t picture any of this. I want to throw up all the time. I’m pretty sure Sophie does, too. Instead, we talk about what color fairy lights she’ll hang in her dorm room, how quickly she’ll be home for fall break.

I try to remember kindergarten, how Sophie was the only kid to pop off the floor that first day to say the Pledge of Allegiance, how she made a best friend, how she only escaped from school once that year. It’s been a summer filled with dramatic goodbyes, and even though I remind Sophie that she’s not moving away forever, sometimes it really does feel that way.

“Hey Mom, let’s get tattoos before I leave,” she said the other day.

“Sure,” I said. “What are you thinking of getting?”

She paused for dramatic effect, choosing the title of one of her favorite Taylor Swift songs: “Never Grow Up.”

LAUREN GILGER: That was The Show’s executive producer, Amy Silverman.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.